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An array of shrubs and small trees flower throughout Western North Carolina each spring. The ones that stand out in my mind as being truly showy are pink-shell azalea, flame azalea, Pieris (fetterbush), fringe tree (grancy graybeard) and silverbell.

Year-round silverbell displays eye-catching features that make it a desirable item for home gardens and landscaping. It’s normally a shrub or small tree with alternate finely-toothed deciduous leaves. Young stems display distinctive white or yellow streaks.

Come midsummer, the plant produces interesting podlike fruits about 2 inches long that are brownish-gold in color and have four broad wings.

No one seems to know for sure what function the wings serve, as the fruits are too heavy to become airborne. Since the tree often grows beside streams, I would suggest the so-called “wings” are really “paddles” that assist with seed distribution whenever the fruits happen to fall from an overhanging limb into the water. The seeds of shrub yellowroot — another streamside plant — have flotation bladders that serve the same purpose.

In his pocket guide to the “Trees of the Great Smokies” (1992), Steve Kemp has this to say about silverbell bark:

“More often than not it’s the bark of this tree that reveals its identity. It tends to flake in rough, rectangular, purple or blue-black scales that bear a certain resemblance to a milk-chocolate bar. Some naturalists, in fact, refer to this species as the ‘Hersey tree.’”

It is also known as bell wood, snowdrop tree and opossum tree. The origins of the first two names are apparent, but the third is another mystery.

Drooping clusters of bell-shaped pale-white flowers are suspended below its branches on springy stems. Flowering from late March into May from the lowest elevations up to 5,000 feet, it’s a lovely tree often overlooked because its white flowers are virtually overwhelmed by the white bracts of the legions of dogwood trees in bloom at about the same time.

Most taxonomists are comfortable with the notion that there is but one species of Carolina silverbell (Halesia tetraptera) in the upland Piedmont and mountainous terrain of North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama. The generic name honors the writer Stephen Hales (1677-1761), while the specific name means “four-winged.”

Throughout perhaps 95 percent of the geographic range indicated above, the silverbells you’ll encounter will be shrubs or smallish trees not more than 35 feet in height that form a rounded crown. The leaves will not be much more than 3 inches long and the flowers not more than an inch in length.

But if you examine the silverbells in the general area of the Great Smokies in Western North Carolina and east Tennessee, you’ll encounter trees with a single trunk standing from 60-90 feet tall with leaves up to 11 inches long and flowers more than 2 inches in length. And unlike most silverbells, these in the heart of the Southern Appalachians (where the creation of new species is a growth industry) bear flowers with pistils and stamens that do not extend beyond the lips of the flower.

Some authorities — including Alan Weakley, the noted taxonomist and herbarium curator at UNC Chapel Hill — haven’t as yet assigned the silverbells that occur within this Smokies enclave any taxonomic recognition, “judging them to be too intergradient to be practically delineated.”

Others do allow it some status as a variant (Halesia tetraptera var. monticola). And then there are those in the minority, like myself, who are perhaps all too ready and willing to give it species recognition as “Halesia monticola” with the common name “mountain silverbell.” The designation “monticola” means something like “mountain dweller.”

I am perhaps unduly influenced in this regard not by a scientific paper or a field manual but by a silverbell growing on the bank across the creek from where I am sitting as I write this column. The single main trunk extends to about 75 feet in height with a diameter of over a foot.

If I took a break and went across the footbridge to visit the tree (nothing wrong with visiting trees so long as you don’t hug them) I could see that the blossoms are well over 2 inches in length and note how the dark bark is furrowed into plates that look like … well they do sort of look like miniature Hersey bars.

In their presence I can almost sense that these Smokies-area silverbells are distinct entities, ready and patiently waiting for that recognition to come along — which is perhaps why Alan Weakley is a world-class botanist and I’m not.

George Ellison is a naturalist and writer. His wife, Elizabeth Ellison, is a painter and papermaker who owns a gallery in Bryson City. Contact them at info@georgeellison.com or info@elizabethellisongallery.com or write to P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, NC 28713.